Strip clubs and freedom of speech area is a touchy -- or no-touchy -- subject

By SUSAN PAYNTER, P-I COLUMNIST

Published 9:00 pm, Thursday, November 2, 2006

I can sympathize with the lips zipped over Tuesday's vote on the 4-foot strip-club rule.

Standing up in favor of or against what some men sit down for -- and maybe even unzip for -- in Seattle's remaining "gentlemen's clubs" doesn't exactly inspire uplifting Lincoln-Douglas-level debate.

Even Tim Killian, manager of the club owners' mega campaign to kill Referendum 1, told the P-I: "It's not the kind of issue people feel comfortable talking about."

But the sheer glut of "Save Free Speech, Vote No on 1" signs started getting to me.

Along with clever "no more nanny state" TV ads showing Keystone Kops measuring Betty Boop bathing suits, it's easy to see where more than $850,000 in sweaty twenties has been spent on this push to persuade voters that this is all about the prude police.

I rarely recall seeing so many signs. They seem to sprout like flag toothpicks at a Fourth of July barbecue along every four feet of parking strip and roadway shoulder.

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Last week a huge one -- a sign the size of a small billboard erected in the yard of a small, neat house on a Crown Hill corner -- made me stop, park and ring the doorbell.

I figured that either the resident's livelihood comes directly out of G-strings or he or she has somehow become firmly convinced that the right of a stripper to grind around on a guy's groin for cash is truly about the precious essence of freedom.

That's because lap dances have about as much to do with the right of free speech as Rush Limbaugh does with the rights of the disabled.

Still, when colleagues and fellow columnists call the 4-foot rule "inane" and insist that unfettered nudie naughtiness is a sign of big-city sophistication, it isn't easy to paint a "priss" target on your back and rise to disagree.

With a shudder, I remembered the pillorying of former City Council member Margaret Pageler as a cartoonish, purse-lipped school marm when she pursued the issue.

Then, studying the official State Voters' Pamphlet this week, some words in the statement for Referendum 1 struck me, possibly because they were my very own. They were lifted from a column I had written when the city first began grappling with what really happens in the darkened corners of these clubs -- something you would have to stretch more than four feet to see as anything but the exchange of sex for cash.

"Although touching is supposedly forbidden, in the less-lighted recesses of at least two of the clubs, men reported seeing 'dancers' opening patrons' pants, putting on condoms and, at the very least, rubbing private parts through men's clothing to the point of some tough laundry stains."

Maybe, as some have written and speechified, that really isn't much of a problem. Indeed, police do have more serious matters -- such as street prostitution -- to patrol.

But doesn't society always have a sliding scale of woes to worry about -- some of them worse than others?

If we want a vote, up or down, on legalizing prostitution, then, in the words of G.W. Bush, bring it on. But if, outside of Nevada, we still oppose the oldest profession when it is practiced on the street, do we ignore it when it's inside a club that may soon be built next to your house?

City Council member (and former columnist) Jean Godden has said that her concern is "for the First Amendment and also for my feeling that too often we have men telling women what they can do with their own bodies."

And, yes, I read more than 100 letters from strippers sent to other City Council members the last time the more-than-arm's-length rule was debated. Those letters claimed that, without lap dancing, moms and students couldn't possibly pay the rent, support their kids and ailing elderly parents, and pay their tuition to med school.

I don't know how many of those letters Godden read. If she did see them, she may have noticed that they were all postmarked about the same time and expressed amazingly similar circumstances. In other words, they smelled like any other orchestrated letter-writing campaign -- a campaign run by club-owning men with a lot to gain by telling women what to do with their letters in order to keep big pots of cash.

I also don't know how many former sex-industry workers and strippers Godden has interviewed over the years. But, soon after escaping the so-called adult entertainment industry, the many with whom I have spoken usually confide how exploited they felt at the time. Many say they must pay club owners onerous fees just for the chance to "dance." Then they must push the envelope of illegal conduct further and further in order to make up the difference.

Somehow the 4-foot rule -- in the clubs where it is still required -- survives in Bellevue, Everett, Federal Way, Kirkland, Lake Forest Park and Tacoma. In Burien, it's 10 feet.

True, there is no such restriction against "the nearness of you" in Chicago or Philly, Dallas or Denver. So, if that's the "freedom" we want here, and if we accept the reality of the behavior it brings -- then, in an exercise of true free speech -- let's at least be willing to straighten our laps, open our yaps and say so.